"It is enough--thou shalt have audience with the king at once. I can obtain it for thee; God's justice shall not ever sleep, and William is His chosen instrument. Hark!"
The compline bell began to ring.
"William attends the service tonight. I will crave an audience for thee; meanwhile, compose thy thoughts for God's holy house. Come, my son, this is the way to the chapel."
If the reader has visited the old colleges in Oxford or Cambridge, he will easily conceive a fair idea of the general appearance of the abbey of Abingdon.
There were the same quadrangles (vulgarly called "quads"), the same cloisters, open to the air, but sheltered from sun and rain; which find their fairest modern example, perhaps, in Magdalene College, Oxen. The cells of the monks resembled in size and position the rooms of the undergraduates at the olden colleges, although they were far less luxuriously furnished.
Nor was the element of learning wanting. The Benedictines were indeed the scholars of Europe, and some hundred boys were educated, free of cost, at Abingdon--the cloisters in summer serving as their classrooms. And let me tell my schoolboy readers, the fare and the discipline were alike very hard.
But the chapel in great abbeys--like the one we are writing about--resembled a cathedral rather than a college chapel. And he who has the general plan of a cathedral in his mind can easily imagine the abbey church of St. Mary's at Abingdon.
The choir was devoted to the monks alone; the nave and aisles apportioned to the laity; the side chapels contained altars dedicated to special saints, and occasional services.
Such was the building into which Etienne de Malville entered, not without religious awe, as the pealing organ--then recently introduced by the Normans--rolled its volume of sound through the vaulted aisles.
The monks were all in the choir, which was lighted by torches and tapers. In the nave a few laity of the town were scattered--here a knight or soldier, there a mechanic.